No. 881: Clerkenwell Road, EC1

Of London’s many Halls only two or three have programmes peculiar to themselves: the others are supplied by roving performers who appear sometimes at as many as four in one evening, rushing from one to another in their broughams or motor cars, and perhaps changing their costumes on the journey. The system is an absurd one, for it not only tends to eliminate personal character, but introduces into the evening’s progress a mathematical precision that is contrary to the Bohemian free-and-easiness that ought to prevail. Encores become impossible, because the unforeseen delay of five minutes thus produced in one Hall would upset the time tables of the two or three others whither the comedian is bound like an arrow immediately he has acknowledged the applause.